Kill the Messenger

11

Eta Fitzgerald was a creature of habit. Every morning at quarter of six she dumped the last of her wake-up coffee in the sink, kissed her elderly mother on the cheek, and hit the road.

She lived with her mother and four children in a nondescript little tract house in a nice working-class neighborhood beneath one of the more commonly used flight paths for jets in and out of LAX. The Fitzgerald family had migrated to Los Angeles from New Orleans eight years earlier, during a booming economy, before bankruptcy and terrorist scares cut a swath through the airline industry. Her husband, Roy, a jet mechanic, had taken a job with Delta, and never missed a day’s work in six years, until a platform collapsed while he was working on a 747 and he fell to his death.

At quarter of six it took Eta no time to get downtown. By quarter of seven the trip would be twice as long. By quarter of eight the roads would be bumper-to-bumper and so slow that she would be able to read the LA Times front to back before she got where she was going.

Her first stop downtown was always the Carl’s Jr. at Fifth and Flower, where she would sit down for a second cup of coffee and a greasy, calorie-busting, artery-clogging egg and sausage sandwich. More often than not she saw some of her messengers there as they fueled up for the day. Sometimes she would chat with them and catch up with their lives off their bikes. Sometimes she only observed.

She could have found a better-paying job. She had worked dispatch for the New Orleans Police Department, and for a couple of years with a private ambulance company in Encino. But she’d had her fill of life-and-death situations, and she didn’t need to make a million. Roy’s insurance and pension took good care of the family. Eta liked working at Speed. The messengers were strange and interesting characters, a ragtag bunch of kids and grown men who had never been able to take any road but the one less traveled. They were a family, of sorts. Eta was their mother hen.

Mojo raised a hand to acknowledge her. He stood at the far corner booth with one foot up on the seat, leaning forward as he told two messengers from another agency one of the fantastic stories that made up his past. He was a wild-looking guy, that Mojo. The dreads, the black black skin stretched taut over a tall, bony frame. He dressed in layers of rags, like a homeless person, and when his eyes went wide, he looked crazy.

Mojo had been known to put voodoo curses on cabdrivers who had cut him off—had nearly got himself thrown in jail once for chasing a driver into a noodle shop, grabbing him by the collar, and screaming curses at him as he shook his necklace of chicken bones and claws and God knew what all in the man’s face.

That was Mojo’s gig, his thing that kept folks from looking too closely at him. Eta happened to know his real name was Maurice, and he read poetry and played a badass saxophone open-mike nights at a jazz club in West LA.

She sipped her coffee and looked around for any of her other “children.” Gemma, a redheaded girl in bike pants and a tight colorful jersey, was sucking on the straw of a super-size Coke, looking through the LA Weekly. She was taking a year off from college to make some money and to experience urban life.

Through the window Eta could see Preacher John pacing up and down the sidewalk, already beginning his rant of the day. Mojo liked to play crazy, Preacher John was the real deal, but somehow he managed to get his deliveries made. Divine intervention, Eta supposed. He did his job as long as he stayed on his meds. When he went off them, he would disappear for weeks at a time. The boss, Rocco, kept John on because he was a nephew or something, so the family could keep tabs on him.

Eta dumped her tray in the trash and went back out into the early-morning gloom. Preacher John came toward her, shaking his worn-out old Bible at her, calling, “Sister! Sister!”

“Don’t you be coming at me with that wife of Heber shit!” Eta warned, holding up a hand. “I am a God-fearing, churchgoing Christian, John Remko.”

He pulled up and tilted his head sideways, lucid enough to be sheepish. “Eta! Eta, my queen of Africa!”

“I’m the queen of your ass,” she barked. “You better take your happy pills, honey, and get yourself down to Base.”

She shook her head as she went to her van, muttering, “How that boy hasn’t been killed in traffic, I don’t know.”

She hefted herself into the driver’s seat of her minivan and reached to put the key in the ignition. The hand was over her mouth before she could even realize where it had come from.

“Don’t scream.”

The hell I won’t, she thought, trying to throw herself forward to break his hold. Her eyes went to the rearview mirror. She wanted to see him so she could tell the cops what he looked like before she beat his sorry face in.

“It’s me.”

The hand fell away, and the tension rushed out of her in a gust of air.

“Boy, you done scared three lives out of me!” she snapped, still looking at him via the rearview.

“I’m sorry,” Jace said. “I knew you would react. If you screamed, you might have attracted somebody. Like a cop.”

Eta swiveled around, scowling at the boy crouching on the floor of her backseat. Boy. He claimed he was twenty-one, but she didn’t believe him and couldn’t look at his sweet face and call him anything other than a boy.

“And just why don’t you want cops looking at you?” she asked, taking in the scrapes and bruises on his face. “What you been into, Lone Ranger?”

“Someone tried to make roadkill out of me on that last run last night.”

“People in this town get crazy when it rains.”

“Did you see anything on the news about the lawyer Lenny Lowell?”

“I don’t stay up for the news. Ain’t never anything on it that ain’t bad. Who’s Lenny What?”

“Money,” Jace said. “My last run. The lawyer.”

“Oh, yeah. What about him?”

He tossed a folded section of the Times on the passenger seat. “It’s in there. Someone killed him last night. After I made the pickup.”

Eta stared at him. This boy would no more kill someone than her mother would get up and dance the hoochie-coochie. But he was afraid of the cops, and someone was dead.

“The cops are looking for me,” he said. “I might have been the last person to see the guy alive—except for who killed him.”

“So you tell them what you know,” Eta said.

“No way. No way I go to the cops. I was in that office last night. I touched things. My fingerprints are there. They get me in the box, match my prints . . . It’s a slam dunk for them. No.”

“But, honey, someone tried to kill you,” Eta said reasonably.

Jace looked incredulous. “And you think they’d believe me? I don’t have any proof of that. I don’t have any witnesses.”

“Honey, have you looked in a mirror today?”

“All the more reason to consider me a suspect. There was a struggle. Eta, you’ve got to help me out here. The cops are going to show up at Speed sooner or later. They’re going to ask a lot of questions.”

“You want me to lie to the police?” she asked, frowning. “That’s not good, son. If you’ve got nothing to hide, then don’t hide nothing. I’ve known a lot of cops in my day, a lot of homicide detectives. They get the scent of something, they’re gonna track it down. And the harder you make it for them, the harder they’ll make it on you.”

“Eta, please. You don’t have to lie to them. Just—just stall them.”

The boy had the clearest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. And all they were filled with now was fear.

He reached out and put his hand on her forearm. “Just tell them you don’t know anything about me.”

I don’t know anything about you, she thought. In the couple of years she’d known him she hadn’t learned a thing about him. She didn’t know if he had family, didn’t know where he lived, didn’t know what he did away from the job. He was still a mystery. He wasn’t antisocial, he was quiet. He wasn’t an introvert, he was a watcher. If he had a steady girlfriend, no one at Speed knew about it. He laughed at a joke, had a smile that could have sold movie tickets, but most of the time the look in his eyes was . . . careful. Not quite suspicious, but not inviting anyone in either.

Eta sighed. “What you gonna do, J.C.? You gonna run?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s no good answer, you. You run, I guarantee they’ll hang this thing on you. Then what? You run for the rest of your life?”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath that made him wince, then sighed. “I’ll figure it out. I have to. I just need some time.”

Eta shook her head sadly. “You won’t let anyone help you.”

“I’m asking you to help me. Please.”

“What do you need? You need a place to stay?”

“No, thanks, Eta.” He glanced away, embarrassed. “If you could advance me some cash . . . You know I’m good for it.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she said, starting the van. “I got money in the safe at the office.”

“I can’t go there.”

“You can keep your skinny ass right where you at. I’ll park at the back door and bring the money out to you.”

“What if the cops are watching the place?”

“What do you take me for? Honey, I done forgot more about cops than you’ll ever know.”

Or so she wanted to think. Suddenly she wanted to ask him everything she didn’t know about him, but she knew he wouldn’t give her the answers. “Baby, that dead lawyer, he ain’t no crime kingpin. He ain’t running the mob out of some nasty office in some nasty strip mall. He ain’t worth the money it’d cost the taxpayers to set up surveillance on every courier service in LA. First they gots to figure out who done the pickup. Unless that man was the neat-and-tidy kind, keeping notes of who done what, when, why. He strike you like that?”

Jace shook his head.

“Then lay down on the floor and stay there ’til I tell you something else.”

“You’re the best, Eta.”

“You’re damn straight I am,” she grumbled, pulling away from the curb. “Y’all don’t appreciate Miss Eta. Hanging my big black bootie out there for y’all. I don’t know what you’d do without me.”